Crawley Town 0-2 Cambridge United: Reds suffer damaging defeat in fight to avoid relegation
It was a disastrous afternoon for Crawley Town as they were defeated 2-0 by Cambridge United at the Broadfield Stadium.
Rob Elliot made three changes to the side that were defeated 3-1 by Blackpool last weekend, with Bradley Ibrahim returning to the starting XI after serving his two-match suspension and Rory Feely who was handed his first start in a Reds shirt.
Armando Quirtina also re-joined the starting line-up for the first time since his rumoured move to Atlético Talleres broke down at the end of January.
In the opening exchanges, it was clear to see that both sides did not want to commit many men forward in fear of conceding an early opener.
This resulted in a lack of goalmouth action until the 20th minute when the game’s intensity suddenly improved.
Ryan Loft should have opened the scoring for the visitors but he was unable to keep his header under the crossbar. At the other end of the pitch , Charlie Barker put an enticing ball into the box for Harry Forster whose header was diverted for a corner.
Despite finally stringing some passes together, It was still not good enough from Crawley and they soon found themselves behind.
After an impressive solo run from Josh Stokes to win a corner, Jojo Wollacott couldn’t keep hold of the corner kick that was crossed in and dropped the ball into the path of Elias Kachunga who had an empty net to give the visitors the lead.
Moments later, Cambridge should have scored again but Dion Conroy was on hand to clear the ball off the line from another corner.
It was a fairly uninspiring first half of football from the Crawley perspective with Reds not showing a huge amount of fight and this needed to change in the second half if they wanted to get anything from the game.
However, things went from bad to worse on the hour mark when Rushian Hepburn-Murphy was sent off for losing his composure, before the visitors doubled their advantage through Paul Digby who smashed his strike from close range into the roof of the net.
Reds did get a lifeline with 20 minutes left to play when James Gibbons was shown a red card for a dangerous challenge on Quitirna but they couldn’t utilize this.
After today’s results across League One, Crawley and Cambridge are now six points from safety and both on 29 points.